News + Events

CSAIL Staff Honored With Infinite Mile Awards

Tue, 05/31/2011

Press Contact

In recognition of their commitment, dedication and integrity, eight CSAIL members were recently honored for their outstanding contributions to the lab. John Beane, Jason Dorfman, Arthur Prokosch, Jon Proulx, Colleen Russell, Eric Schwartz, Jay Sekora and Garrett Wollman were all presented with School of Engineering Infinite Mile Awards for Excellence last week. The Infinite Mile Award, launched by the School of Engineering in 2001, was created to recognize and reward members of the School’s administrative, support, service, sponsored research and academic staff.

Assistant Dean Donna Savicki presented the award to Colleen Russell, administrative assistant to Professor and CSAIL Director Victor Zue, noting her incredible ability to assist over 900 individuals- including MIT faculty, CSAIL principal investigators, research staff, support staff and students- with tasks both large and small, all while maintaining a cheerful smile. “Colleen is tirelessly helping everyone at CSAIL,” said Savicki, quoting one of Russell’s nominators for the award. “She has a wonderful, warm personality and is always willing to go the extra mile.”

The members of CSAIL’s TIG (The Infrastructure Group) technical team were honored for their work maintaining an immensely complicated computing infrastructure 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Senior System Administrators Jon Proulx and Jay Sekora, Network Engineer Garrett Wollman and System Administrators John Beane, Jason Dorfman, Arthur Prokosch and Eric Schwartz were commended for their work each and every day, but in particular for the actions they took over this past holiday season when they sacrificed their vacation to fight a perfect storm of technical failures and restore the lab’s network to normal. “Seeing how the technical team responded to this crisis reaffirmed to lab members that their world-class research is supported by some world class professionals,” said Assistant Dean Eileen Ng-Ghavidel, quoting a nominator.